This comprehensive one-volume encyclopedia charts the history and scope of the field of semiotics and highlights its relevance to the study of new forms of communication in 300 accessible and informative articles. Coverage includes the life and work of important authors and theorists, the impact of various centres and schools of thought, the meaning of key terms, and the scope of semiotic analysis in various disciplines and domains. Providing both a detailed assessment of the subject and an informed view of its many applications, the work is a definitive reference source.

This text offers an interdisciplinary account of reference and categorization within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Central issues are the distinction between lexical vagueness and polysemy as well as the creation of new meanings in English and German. Polysemy is resolved by a computational implementation in a machine-translation system.

Textbooks have long been considered a pivotal learning and teaching resource in classrooms. However, there is a paucity of research on how teachers use textbooks in relation to their beliefs, with analytic methods in such studies mainly restrained to content-based thematic analysis. To this end, from the perspectives of Halliday's (1994) systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and Vygostky's (1978) socio-cultural theory (SCT), this book explores how a Chinese college English teacher acts upon his beliefs and uses textbooks to mediate his students' English learning in his classroom. Drawing on constructs of the SFL-based appraisal and speech function as well as interview excerpts, the study reveals that in the textbook-based classroom the Chinese college English teacher acts upon his beliefs that are constructed by diverse contextual factors. Implications of this study include using SFL and SCT to explore educators' beliefs and practices and also providing effective teacher education for Chinese college English instructors to reshape their beliefs so that they are better prepared to use textbooks in classrooms.

This book is an interdisciplinary study of English binominal quantitative constructions based on English-Chinese comparison. Taking three perspectives, i.e. a functional-typological perspective, a cognitive approach, and a corpus-based method, it aims to unveil the hidden categorisation process behind the usage of English binominal quantitative constructions and to reveal the language universal in cognising the concepts of 'Quantity' and 'Quality'. It argues against treating Chinese and English as members of two opposing typological camps concerning quantification modes ('classifier languages' versus 'non-classifier languages') and advocates to view the two languages as lying within a more extended and inclusive system, viz. a system of quantification and categorisation modes, or a Quantity-Quality continuum.

There's No Word for Saudade contains twenty-one essays aimed at a readership interested in cultural and historical materials, including those related to Portuguese America. Significant figures covered include John Dos Passos, Charles Reis Felix, Julian Silva, John Philip Sousa, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, James Merrill, and the Azorean John Francis, businessman, patron, and friend to the fabled Provincetown Players. Concluding essays scrutinize and judge the phenomenon of the Portuguese movie in the 1930s and 1940s, and trace the history of the tricky but persistently present Portuguese concept of saudade.

Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages focuses on discourse-pragmatic studies on the domains of evidentiality and epistemic modality, and also includes studies on deontic modality. The book presents ground-breaking research on the functions and the discourse-pragmatic variation of evidential expressions and modals in diverse discourses and genres, applying corpus-based methodologies. It offers unique features regarding content, usage and methodology, and comparative studies. The comparative viewpoint is addressed in contributions which provide a usage-based cross-linguistic account of the expression of evidentiality and modality in various European languages (English, French, Italian, Romanian and Spanish). The contributions are representative of the work on evidentiality and modality in European languages carried out in a substantial number of countries, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Sweden.

We are witnessing the collapse of democracies in many parts of the world and a general tendency to the resurgence of right-wing and left-wing populisms led by authoritarian leaders. This book centres on the political dialogue in one of these democracies. The focus is on Venezuela, the rich Latin American oil producing country, and its transformation from a stable democracy to a very unstable and controversial revolution in which the dialogue has been occupied by only one party for 18 years. The central characters of the book are Hugo Chavez, who remained in power for 14 years as the main speaker and controller, and the people who either followed or opposed him in Venezuela and other countries. Contrary to critical analyses which are mainly based on social representations that conceive dialogue as implicit or normative, this book proposes a dialogue-centred approach, which articulates linguistics, conversation analysis, socio-pragmatics and political science from a critical perspective, and offers the theoretical foundations and procedures for analysing micro dialogues between specific persons and the macro social dialogue, which unveils the processes of domination and resistance to power. The book will be useful for scholars and students of linguistics, media, communication studies and political science wishing to learn more about dialogue in political interaction.

During the last 15 years, cognitive scientists have discovered things about the nature and importance of metaphor that are startling because of their radical implications for metaphor research and because they require us to rethink some of our most fundamental received notions of meaning, concepts, and reason. Many of the theoretical assumptions that guided earlier generations who worked on metaphor have been undermined by this new research, which has profound implications for philosophy.
More specifically, the level of methodological sophistication of empirical studies of metaphor has increased markedly, making possible rigorous, detailed analyses of how metaphors actually structure conceptualization and reasoning. In addition, professionals have learned that metaphor is not merely a linguistic phenomenon but more fundamentally a conceptual and experiential process that structures the world. The articles in this special issue make significant contributions to these advances.

This book offers a cognitive-semiotic approach to metaphoricity of visual representations in static visual narratives referred to as comics. It implements this approach in an exploration of conventionalized visual signs depicting diegetic situations, motion events, sound events, and diverse psychological experiences in such narratives. With his focus on the intersection of comics studies, conceptual metaphor theory, and Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs, the author analyzes a broad array of attested data retrieved from comics exemplifying various publication formats, generic conventions, and cultural traditions. His exploration situates the metaphoricity of the analyzed visual signs against the backdrop of their overall semiotic makeup and in relation to the metaphoricity of their linguistic counterparts.

The book presents the first comprehensive description of avialinguistics. The author analyses this new interdisciplinary branch of applied linguistics that recognises the role of language for aviation purposes. She provides an integrated approach to Aeronautical English and proffers insights into aviation discourse, discussing its current linguistic errors and providing suggestions for aviation English communication improvement. The author tests theoretical considerations against illustrative real-life examples so as to facilitate an interpretation of regular pilot-controller communications.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

A Guide to Creating Student-Staffed Writing Centers, Grades 6-12, Revised Edition is a how-to and, ultimately, a why-to book for middle school and high school educators as well as for English/language arts teacher candidates and their methods instructors. This revised and updated International Writing Centers Association 2006 Book of the Year shows writing centers as places where writers work with each other in an effort to develop ideas, discover a thesis, overcome procrastination, create an outline, or revise a draft. Ultimately, writing centers help students become more effective writers. Visit any college or university in the United States and chances are there is a writing center available to students, staff, and community members. Writing centers support students and busy teachers while emphasizing and supporting writing across the curriculum.

This book discusses and explores the relationship between language and world view. David Lee presents recent research in linguistics, drawing together strands from a number of different areas of the subject: the nature of linguistic and conceptual categories, the role of metaphor in the everyday use of language, gender differentiation and social variation in speech.In this study, David Lee considers a broad range of issues in the light of two contrasting views on language. For much of its history, linguistics has been dominated by a tradition which sees individual languages as uniform, homogenous systems. However, there has always been an opposite view emphasising the complex tensions and cross-currents inherent in linguistic usage. This alternative perspective is explored in the analysis of a wide range of literary and non-literary texts: casual conversations, interviews, newspaper reports, official memoranda, television commercials and extracts from novels. The author describes how both spoken and written texts can be seen as the sites where tensions between "competing discourses", stemming from different social positions and perspectives, are illustrated.

Meaning, Discourse and Society investigates the construction of reality within discourse. When people talk about things such as language, the mind, globalisation or weeds, they are less discussing the outside world than objects they have created collaboratively by talking about them. Wolfgang Teubert shows that meaning cannot be found in mental concepts or neural activity, as implied by the cognitive sciences. He argues instead that meaning is negotiated and knowledge is created by symbolic interaction, thus taking language as a social, rather than a mental, phenomenon. Discourses, Teubert contends, can be viewed as collective minds, enabling the members of discourse communities to make sense of themselves and of the world around them. By taking an active stance in constructing the reality they share, people thus can take part in moulding the world in accordance with their perceived needs.

The book looks into the in situ organization of ethnic and racial categorization in interviews in English as a lingua franca. It proposes the combined ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach. The author shows that the negotiation of ethnic identity categories concerns stereotypes and evaluations included in ethnic categorization. She establishes that the ways of negotiating ethnic identity categories are largely systematic, which indicates that talk participants share the norms of construing ethnic identity categories and recognize preferred and dispreferred categorization. The book reveals that ambiguous categorial references are a special challenge for talk participants. Social types and groups are used not only to create but also to avoid prejudiced ethnic categorization.

This book analyzes events and narratives from the points of view of literature, grammar, discourse, and semantics. The contributors explore the issues related to the ways of portraying stories and their events within a cultural and literary framework. They also examine the role of prefixes in construing events and asymmetries that exist in time-creating event markers from a contrastive perspective. The contributions focus on narrativity as a semantic category, and on how events are described in signed languages. They place the event and narrative categories at the center of interest and their specific goals are pursued by applying different, both qualitative and quantitative, research methods.

A Rhetoric and Philosophy of Gifts synthesizes a scope of rhetorical and philosophical perspectives of the gift. Eberhardinger asks "What is the relationship between gifts and rhetoric?" She contextualizes the question throughout a review of related literature, analysis, examples, and personal anecdotes of overseas experiences. Eberhardinger concludes the book by offering implications and opportunities for interpreting gifts, thereby addressing why the question concerning the relationship between gifts and rhetoric matters for the larger landscape of international relations, intercultural friendship, and peace-making. Scholars of communication, rhetoric, and philosophy will find this book particularly interesting.

Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure is a collection of essays whose shared purpose is to offer an accessible interdisciplinary exploration of the social dynamics behind confessional discourse. As various contributors to this collection demonstrate, confession is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, not only within psychological or therapeutic frameworks or literary analysis, but also in internet discussion groups, in the criminal justice system, in political rhetoric, in so-called "reality" and interview-style television programming, in writing pedagogy and, increasingly, in the testimonial strain observable in contemporary scholarship. Yet, "telling one's story" raises questions, not only about authorial intent or authenticity, but also about the pressures disclosure can impose upon its audiences. Far less ubiquitous than confessions themselves, as these contributors suggest, are the critical tools that general audiences might employ in order to better evaluate the rhetoric of personal disclosure. It is, in fact, the shortage of such tools - responses and procedures that could be stated plainly and implemented by any reader or viewer - that Compelling Confessions sets out to address.

This book is intended to contribute to the clarification of the linguistic research area covered by the terms modal, evidential and epistemic. It sets out to demonstrate that on cross-linguistic grounds a hitherto overlooked epistemic meaning domain must be given due recognition in linguistic theory, on a par with domains such as time and number. The relevant domain is coherent, but at the same time complex in that it consists of two subdomains: one which comprises degree-of-certainty meanings, and one which comprises information-source meanings. The book offers three arguments for giving recognition to such a meaning domain. The first argument concerns the clustering of linguistic expressions with epistemic meaning into morphosyntactically delimited systems of elements. The second argument has to do with the variation pertaining to the coding of epistemic meanings, as highlighted in a semantic map of epistemic expressions. The third argument turns upon the scope properties of epistemic meanings and the morphosyntactic reflections of these properties. Finally, the book proposes a unified cognitive analysis of epistemic meaning in terms of which it attempts to account for the properties of the epistemic meaning domain as well as of individual epistemic meanings.

The book approaches the language experiments with great apes performed in the last 50 years from the point of view of logical semantics, speech act theory, and philosophy of the social sciences based on the linguistic turn in philosophy. The author reconstructs the experiments with the great apes Washoe, Chantek, Lana, Sherman, Austin, Kanzi, Sarah and Sheba who were taught various kinds of languages, including the language of mathematics. From the point of view of the philosophy of science these experiments are interpreted as being part of the social sciences. The book proposes new mathematical experiments that are based on modern semantical reconstruction of the language of mathematics. The author shows that modern scientific research into great apes has shifted from natural science to social science.

Plato in the Third Sophistic examines the influence and impact of Plato and Platonism in the era of Byzantine and Christian rhetoric. The volume brings together specially commissioned articles from leading scholars of late antique philosophy and literature. Their examinations show that Plato is the single most important and influential literary figure used to frame the literature of this time. Plato in the Third Sophistic will help scholars and students from a wide range of disciplines to better understand the development of Christian literature in this era as an essential link in the history of Platonism as well as that of Christianity.

Written by the Han philosopher Xu Gan (A.D. 170-217), Balanced Discourses is an inquiry into the causes of political breakdown. It provides a unique contemporary account of the social, intellectual, and cosmological factors that Xu Gan identified as having precipitated the demise of the Han order. This edition of Zhonglun (or Balanced Discourses) contains the original Chinese text with annotations and, on facing pages, an English translation also accompanied by annotations. This collection of essays spans a range of topics, from Confucian cultivation to calendrical calculation. Xu's perspectives are of not only historical but also philosophical interest, for they reveal his belief in a special correlative bond that should exist between names and actualities and his understanding of what happens when that bond is broken. The translator, John Makeham, argues in his introduction that the essays display the same quality of balance that Xu Gan sees as essential to social and political equilibrium.